


I Prefer Your Love

by youwilllovemylaugh



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Chubby Kink, M/M, chubby bucky, science teacher bucky, tiny!Steve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 23:39:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2169723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youwilllovemylaugh/pseuds/youwilllovemylaugh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Yay fic exchanges! This one is for Erica <a href="http://pudgybuckys.tumblr.com">pudgybuckys</a>. It got kind of out of hand in my head, so this is only the first part of it! I'll be updating again soon.</p><p>Title is from the eponymous St. Vincent song.</p>
    </blockquote>





	I Prefer Your Love

**Author's Note:**

> Yay fic exchanges! This one is for Erica [pudgybuckys](http://pudgybuckys.tumblr.com). It got kind of out of hand in my head, so this is only the first part of it! I'll be updating again soon.
> 
> Title is from the eponymous St. Vincent song.

For a while, Steve lived alone in San Francisco. It was right after college, right after he and Bucky agreed to take a break and see the world for what it was, what it could offer each of them. He hadn’t planned on each of them finding jobs on opposite coasts: Steve in San Fran, Bucky in New York. But that’s where their lives took them – art was flourishing in San Francisco and there was a shortage of physics teachers in New York City, and it seemed for a little while that maybe the end of the line referred to a split, a departure, instead of a singular point. Maybe, for a little while, Steve and Bucky belonged as far away from each other as possible, as the two fixed points that made the line in the first place.

And then Bucky’s mother died a few months into the agreement, and the night the news broke, Bucky called Steve and told him everything.

“I know we agreed to take a break for now, but I need you here,” Bucky said, and after they wouldn’t let him take a week of leave, Steve quit his job at the art magazine and left the tepid San Francisco sunshine for the frigid New York streets.

When Steve moved out of the place they shared in Red Hook, he’d had trouble figuring out which clothes were his and which were Bucky’s. Steve had always made an effort to hide his skinny frame – he was only five-five, on a good day, and maybe weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet – and Bucky’s clothes were always bigger than his. In the end, he’d taken a dozen and a half shirts out of a drawer at random, and threw them in with his two pairs of jeans and three pairs of shoes, in the suitcase he’d take with him on the plane.

His return to New York heralded a lot of changes, but the first one he noticed in the airport when Bucky came to pick him up. They met in a terminal, movie-scene-style, with Bucky opening his arms wide and taking Steve into a tight embrace. It would have been gauche, Steve thought, had he not felt strange to be there again, head resting against Bucky’s chest like it had for countless cold winter nights, on countless sweltering summer afternoons. For a minute, the world went silent, and all Steve could hear was the sound of Bucky’s heart beating, and tasted salty notes of regret on his tongue.

There was more of Bucky than there had been three months ago. Bucky was terrible at eating well – when he had exams to study for, or grades to make, or classes to teach, he ate constantly, shoving food into his mouth at every and any chance he got, so that he didn’t have to stop studying, or stop thinking, or stop in general. Stress ate at him in the way rust ate away iron: he’d be engulfed in it before he realized he’d been done structural damage. Once, their freshman year, Bucky had gone two weeks without eating anything substantial, and he was hospitalized after a fainting spell in the middle of one of his exams. He’d never let it happen again.

They had not spoken in some time – not at all, until Bucky called to tell Steve about his mother – and so Steve wondered how long Mrs. Barnes had been sick, if her death had been coming for a long time, or if this was unexpected, and she’d gone quietly in the middle of the night, unheard and unseen until Bucky went over on Sunday morning for their weekly brunch and smelled not bacon and French toast, but something rank and terrifying emanating from under the door of her third-floor Hell’s Kitchen walk-up. The former would have stressed Bucky out, but the latter would have caused him to hole up with pizza and Cheetos and milkshakes and French fries when he got home from teaching, like he had done during exam weeks. It was the middle of winter, between grad school semesters, and the roll of fat wasn’t obvious beneath the heavy sweater Bucky wore, but Steve was sure he could see it pulling on the fabric when Bucky released him.

Steve wanted to ask, but didn’t know how. They got on the subway back to their old apartment.

“Clint moved in,” Bucky said, after a long bout of silence punctuated only by the opening and closing of the subway doors, and the chatter of the other passengers in their car. He did not look at Steve as he said this, but at his hands, which were softer and less lined than Steve’s would ever be, after so many years spent with ink and paint caught under his fingernails, in the ridges of his palms. Steve envied Bucky’s round, smooth nails, his soft pink palms. Bucky started wringing his hands. “Just as a friend,” he added, after a moment. “To help out with rent.”

It hadn’t even crossed Steve’s mind to think that Bucky would have moved on in only three months – this was a break, after all, Steve was sure they’d be getting back together – but the clarification unsettled him nonetheless. Steve had been too busy with work and adjusting to his new life to even think about going out to find someone new to spend his nights with. “Okay.”

“He’s still dating Natasha,” Bucky said. “But I’m sure you knew that.”

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Steve did. He nodded.

The rest of their ride was spent in silence. Bucky wrung his hands, and Steve watched, nervously, wondering if he should bring anything up, or wait until they got home. Bucky and Clint were good friends – he would know what was going on, Steve was sure – but something told Steve that a group conversation about this would not end well. Clint had a way of always leaving part of his head in the clouds, of accidentally being offensive when he didn’t mean it. He was, perhaps, too emotionally in tune with himself to really, fully understand how to communicate with other people – Steve knew that, when he got drunk, Clint talked about how afraid he was, of himself, of Natasha, of the future. He had a tendency to shut down when he was sober. When Bucky had told him about his mother, Steve guessed Clint had probably replied with something along the lines of, “Aww, no.”

He’d have to get Bucky alone.

 ~~~

The apartment was largely the same and sweltering as always, although several of Clint’s things had taken up residence in the living room: a gray sweatshirt, stained with beer; a large gaming computer, with flashing lights and a clear CPU; an empty pizza box and several cluttered mugs, with coffee rings around their white insides. Clint did not seem to be home. Bucky bypassed it all, and led Steve into his old studio.

“I moved in here because it was bigger,” Bucky said. “And Clint couldn’t afford to take on most of the rent for it.”

Steve nodded. The room was very different: the walls, which had previously been marked with paint and stained by various liquids, had been whitewashed; instead of a desk and an easel, there was a full-size bed and a small nightstand; the hardwood floors were bare, clear of paint and tarps and plastic bags. A dresser stood beside the small closet, inside which, much to Steve’s surprise, all of Steve’s art supplies still sat in boxes.

“You kept this?”

Bucky shrugged. “San Francisco was never permanent.” He thought about it for a minute. “And oil paint isn’t safe to throw out.”

The paints were in the top drawer of a plastic shelving unit, but the other drawers also held all their old contents. Stacks of newsprint and watercolor paper, Faber-Castell colored pencils, Copic pens, Prismacolor markers, and fine-tipped Sharpies filled the last two drawers, neatly wrapped in bundles with rubber bands. He hid a smile.

“Did you organize these?” He felt Bucky approach him, felt Bucky’s body warmth wash over his back as it radiated from behind him, and looked over his shoulder.

Bucky was blushing. “Before I cleaned up in here, yeah. They were strewn all over the floor when you left, and then the drawer was a mess, so I figured it’d be better to have everything all together.”

“Thanks,” Steve said. He closed the last drawer and straightened.

“Clint is out,” Bucky said. “I found a note on the bathroom door that he’s out with Natasha, but he’ll be back tonight to see you.”

Steve nodded. That had to have been Natasha’s idea – he didn’t see Clint being aware enough to make that decision on his own.

“We can get dinner, if you want,” Bucky said.

“Marcello’s is still open, yeah?” Steve asked. He watched Bucky’s eyebrow shoot up and then back down – Steve was speaking differently, he knew. Steve had noticed the change in speech pattern himself, after a few weeks of lunching with some other people in the office, and he’d grown used to hearing himself use it. His stomach twisted a little.

“Yeah, it’s still open,” Bucky said. “It’s only nine-thirty.”

They left the apartment again, sliding into their coats as Bucky locked up. The night was particularly freezing, but after their brief stint in the extremely hot apartment building, Steve let his coat hang open as they made their way down the street to the hole-in-the-wall Italian deli they’d frequented when they were still together.

Steve had had many dreams of their nights together in college over the last few months. There were almost too many to remember them all, he’d thought, but his mind had dug them all up – like the night before Bucky took the GRE the second time, and they stayed up all night on the quad, throwing snowballs at each other until their noses were red and burning, and Bucky’s eyes watered until tears streamed down his face, with laughter, with cold, with a fear of the unknown more powerful and unlike anything Steve had ever experienced. He’d woken up from the dream freezing his ass off, despite the seventy-degree forecast.

The walk to Marcello’s had featured in those dreams, too. They’d had this apartment together for two years of their time at Pratt, and sometimes more than once a week they’d make the walk down the block to Marcello’s for meatball subs, for prosciutto and provolone and artichoke hearts on fresh Italian bread, for wedding soup sold in plastic quarts. Sometimes they’d go down there to see Marcello himself, when his arthritis wasn’t killing him, and his daughter Maria let him sit behind the cashier counter.

The walk made Steve’s heart ache, like his arms did when he lifted something just a little bit too heavy. Brooklyn was so very much a part of him, and he did miss it, as much as he enjoyed San Francisco and its sunshine, and its people, and its appreciation for art. Brooklyn was home, where he felt safe when he shouldn’t, where he had thriven and grown and learned so much. This walk was as familiar to him as the smell of his mother’s soda bread on St. Patrick’s Day, and as much a part of the past as the slanting two-p.m. sunlight that used to stream into his bedroom windows on Saturday afternoons when he was in high school.

Bucky seemed to feel this bitter nostalgia as well. He was markedly silent the whole way down the street. In his silence, Steve recognized an uncertainty as raw and anxiety-inducing as his own fears about this visit: neither of them knew how long Steve would be here. Despite Bucky’s assertion that “San Francisco was never permanent,” neither of them knew where they stood with the other, neither of them could tell whether Bucky had done the right thing in calling, or Steve in quitting his job to come out here. Bucky walked with his hands in his pockets and his head bent against the blowing polar winds, and Steve ambled along beside him, enjoying the cold and bracing himself for the evening.

Tonight, Maria was behind the counter. She had never been fond of Bucky and Steve, for reasons none of them seemed able to pinpoint, though Steve regularly suspected it was because of the time he’d thrown up in Marcello’s bathroom after Bucky had convinced him to go sake bombing with him and his architecture friends three years ago. He was sure Bucky didn’t remember the night, and Steve knew he didn’t remember enough himself to be able to explain it.

“I’ll have a meatball sub,” Bucky said to her. Steve waited for her to ring Bucky up, but they both looked at him expectantly, as if he was supposed to order at the same time.

“Go ahead,” Bucky said after a beat of awkward silence. “You came all the way out here, I’ll get this one.”

Steve managed a grin, and ordered his eggplant Parmesan sandwich. He stood beside Bucky wordlessly, as he handed Maria money and she went off to make their food. The store was the same as always, sausages and ham hocks hanging from the ceiling, the menus written in chalk in Maria’s loose, steady script. There were a couple of tables in the back, but Steve knew Bucky was going to ask for the sandwiches to go – he never liked to stay in there for long.

They walked out of the store, Steve carrying the sandwiches in a brown paper bag, and made their way home. Bucky let them into the apartment, and Steve dropped the bag over the small wall that divided the kitchen from the foyer and onto the kitchen table, while Bucky walked around and got out cups to pour them each glasses of water.

“I’ve missed this,” Steve said, as he unwrapped his sandwich and was hit by the unmistakable smell of Maria’s famous marinara sauce.

“They don’t make them like this in San Francisco, huh,” Bucky said, taking a large bite of his sandwich.

Steve grinned. “No, they don’t,” he said through a mouthful of food.

Bucky smiled at him. They ate the rest of their meal in silence, and by then it was after ten-thirty, and Steve still hadn’t figured out what he wanted to say.

“You must be tired,” Bucky said finally, avoiding Steve’s gaze and instead staring into his lap.

Steve tried to shrug, but instead he fought off a yawn. “I’m okay.”

As he said this, Clint came barreling through the door, an arm slung around Natasha’s shoulders.

“I told him this wasn’t the night for this, and he didn’t listen,” Natasha said by way of greeting. She rolled her eyes at Bucky, and then, upon noticing Steve, leaned Clint up against the short wall and smiled. “Steve!”

“Hi, Nat,” he said. She walked around to hug him, while Clint let his head loll into an upright position.

“Steeeeeeeeve,” Clint said. His lips were wet and looked elastic enough to render him incapable of producing articulate speech. Steve grinned. “ ’S’good t’see you.”

Natasha’s hair smelled of burnt sugar and raspberries, and Steve buried his face in her neck. Something about her, the feel of her body against his, made him feel as warm and safe and comforted as he had felt when he’d hugged his mother. It brought tears to his eyes.

“It’s good to see you guys, too,” Steve said into Natasha’s neck. She pulled back and kissed his forehead once.

“I’m sorry this idiot is the way he is,” she said, gesturing at Clint, who was now nosing around in Steve’s and Bucky’s leftovers, looking for scraps. “But he’ll be better by morning, for the wake.”

“The wake?” Steve said. “That’s tomorrow?”

Natasha looked over at Bucky, whose right hand lifted to rub the back of his neck in shame. “You didn’t tell him.”

“What was I going to say, Nat?” Bucky said.

“He came here for this express purpose, and you didn’t even tell him when things were happening?” she asked. Bucky sighed. “And you didn’t ask?”  
The question was directed at Steve, who shook his head. In the whirlwind of the last twenty-four hours, and on top of jet lag, Steve’s mind was a little jumbled.

Natasha sighed. “Well, yes, the wake is tomorrow,” she said. “Funeral’s on Friday.”

It was Wednesday. Steve got the feeling that Natasha had helped plan all of these things. “Okay.”

“Do you have the right clothes and stuff?” Natasha asked. “I’m taking Clint to rent his suit tomorrow, if you want to come.”

“Yeah, come with us,” Clint said, perking up again. “We’re going after I go to bed.”

Natasha looked at him, and dropped Steve’s hands. “I should probably get him to the bathroom before he throws up everywhere,” she said. “But I’ll be here if you need me,” she added, and she swiftly escorted Clint out of the room.

Bucky looked at Steve. “Are you mad?” he asked.

Steve shook his head.

~~~ 

He and Bucky had met at Bronx Science, where they’d both been the only kids from Brooklyn in their architecture class, and decided to room together when they both got into Pratt. They’d slept in separate beds for their first semester of college, even after the night of drunken debauchery they’d shared halfway through October. It wasn’t until they’d returned from their month apart for winter break, Bucky in downtown Manhattan and Steve in Flatbush, when they’d returned and said to each other, “Wanna push the beds together?”

They’d slept beside each other every night since, finding ways to stay over at each other’s apartments during the summer, and, eventually, getting the place Bucky now shared with Clint. Steve knew Bucky’s breathing patterns, had traced constellations out of the moles on Bucky’s back with one skinny finger on nights he couldn’t fall asleep, could practically gauge temperature based on his memories of the warmth of Bucky’s skin the morning after a particularly restful night of sleep. The first few weeks living in San Francisco had been the hardest of Steve’s life – on top of a new city, new friends, new roommates, jet lag, and a new job, he had trouble sleeping at night, even after he went on runs and cut back on coffee in an attempt to tire himself out. He had lulled himself to sleep with the jackhammer rhythm of Bucky’s snores, comforted himself after nightmares by pulling Bucky around him like a blanket, for so many years and so many nights that he no longer knew how to fall asleep on his own.

A part of him had hoped, blindly and without accounting for reality, that he and Bucky would share a bed again on this trip. Bucky would be so tired, or so upset, that he would fall into bed and go to sleep without making arrangements for Steve, and Steve would have no choice but to squeeze into bed beside him, and when they woke up, everything would be back to normal.

This was far from the case. Bucky fluffed the pillows and changed the sheets on the bed, and then he got an air mattress from Clint’s room, and set himself up on the floor.

“You can take the bed,” he said. “I’ll take this. Clint and Natasha are down for the night, but don’t worry about making noise if you do, because Clint sleeps like a rock and Natasha will wake no matter what you do.”

Steve already knew this, and Bucky knew that he knew this, but Steve nodded like it was new information anyway. “Okay.”

“Do you have pajamas?” Bucky asked, and Steve shook his head. Bucky’s phone call had come late on Monday night, and Steve had booked the first flight out of California – early the next afternoon – and hadn’t had too much time to pack. He’d thrown a pair of jeans and his one suit in his backpack, and took his toothbrush out of the cup in the bathroom, and hopped the plane to New York. He wasn’t even sure he had clean underwear.

Bucky turned around when Steve didn’t answer, opened a drawer, and pulled out a clean T-shirt and a pair of his boxers, like he had done for so many years. He extended them to Steve, and then, realizing his mistake, said, “I can get you pants, if you want them, but I didn’t think –”

“It’s fine,” Steve said, and Bucky shut up.

He started taking off his clothes, and Bucky turned around to give him privacy. Steve slipped the soft cotton shirt over his shoulders and pulled off his tight jeans. The boxers were loose everywhere, especially his hips; they were something of a godsend after the jeans.

When he was finished changing, he turned around for a reason he could only deem habit, and came face-to-face with a very naked Bucky.

He was hiking up his own boxers when Steve turned around. The waistband hung lower than Steve remembered it doing, and when Bucky pivoted a little to yank his shirt off over his head, Steve saw the belly he’d imagined under Bucky’s sweater at the airport. It was pretty obtrusive, Steve thought, if it hung over even the waistband of Bucky’s boxers. But the more Steve watched Bucky in the few seconds he had before Bucky turned around, the more weight he saw padded onto Bucky’s body – his ass was rounder, his thighs were thicker, even if they still had the same shape Steve had loved so much – widest in the middle, narrowing before Bucky’s knees, creating hollows around Bucky’s muscles where Steve liked to bite and leave hickeys. He carried the weight well, Steve thought, as Bucky turned around.

His pajama shirt was small, smaller than Steve’s it seemed, and it bunched itself all up right on top of Bucky’s belly. Steve could see the small shadow of his belly button right under the hem, and followed Bucky’s long dark happy trail down to the waist of his boxers.

He froze. He shouldn’t have been looking at Bucky like that, not after the last three months, and _especially_ not as long as he had done. He felt heat rise up the back of his neck, redden his ears and mottle his neck, before he managed to look away. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Bucky look away sheepishly, and tug the hem of his shirt down over his belly.

Bucky left the room to brush his teeth, and Steve slumped onto the bed, wondering if he had read as much embarrassment into Bucky pulling his shirt down as there had really been in the gesture.

When Bucky returned, Steve left, and when he finished brushing his teeth, the lights were off in their bedroom. He could already hear Bucky’s breathing tapering off, slowing down and getting heavier, so he tiptoed carefully around the vague outline of Bucky’s sleeping form he could see.

Steve climbed into bed. The sheets were cool; Bucky had cracked open the window next to the bed. Steve buried his face into the pillow and smelled all kinds of things familiar: cedar, a little sweat, the citrus body wash Bucky used, coconut. If that smell could have been bottled and fermented and imbibed, Steve would have injected it straight into his veins. His heart swelled a little, thinking that even though three months had passed, even though his pillow in San Francisco didn’t smell like anything except the laundry detergent he used, everything here was still the same.

Bucky started snoring, rasps that were long and quiet and gasping. Steve rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling while he listened. He was so bone-tired his muscles ached for no reason other than that they’d been active for almost a full day. But his mind had picked up – had been scrambling ever since he’d caught sight of Bucky changing.

Beyond figuring out the basics of his sexuality, which were still a mystery to him on most days, Steve had never really examined his tastes. He didn’t date in high school, rarely lusted after people in magazines or on television. He liked women with fine bones and strong views and soft hair and lipstick, and he liked men who could engulf him with their arms, and he liked the gentle nuances and clashing shades of everything in between. It had never really been a matter of specifics to him, until now. The sight of Bucky like this, with twenty-five extra pounds on his already solid frame had made Steve feel something in a way as sharp and precise as those first few feelings one gets in their early days of burgeoning sexuality.

And then he felt guilty. He wasn’t here to do this – he was here to mourn Bucky’s mother. He wasn’t here to make Bucky come back to him, or to make his life any more complicated than it already was. He couldn’t even come back here to stay – there weren’t jobs for him here, and he had a whole lease to pay out in San Francisco, and he couldn’t see himself leaving that to live here on Bucky’s account.

He rolled over again, curled up in a tiny ball on his side. He had even ruined his chance of talking to Bucky about this one-on-one with his stupid eyes and his stupid unpredictable libido. He shut his eyes. This was all too much to think about on so little sleep, and he was never good at making decisions unless he’d had at least a full night’s rest. Mornings were always better for Steve. He kept this thought in his head as he forced his brain to stop spinning, shut his eyes, and let Bucky’s snores pull him down to sleep.


End file.
